


is there somewhere?

by disorderedorder



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bullying, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Homicide, Parental Death, Patricide, Period-Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, cold-blooded murder, domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 12:31:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14355567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disorderedorder/pseuds/disorderedorder
Summary: "that's what I admire the most about you—the bloodiness of your heart."margaret atwood, the blind assassin





	is there somewhere?

**Author's Note:**

> hi yes this was written in one sitting because henry bowers makes me sad and I love him

The little boy born in the early hours of March twenty-first has soft wisps of blond hair and the clearest blue-grey eyes his mother has ever seen. His little nose is slightly upturned, just like hers, and his tiny fists flail around as he wails. There’s a bit of both his mother and father in him, but as she looks down at her son, she hopes he takes more after her than his father. There is no secret that Butch Bowers is far from a loving, caring father figure, and that the boy was born as a result of drunken car sex following a graduation party in the summer of 1967. Four short weeks later, she received the news, followed by a proposal that lacked all sentiment it should have had. They were married within a year, her belly swollen underneath her wedding dress, her family and his fussing over her, noting the glow she had about her. 

 

Her pregnancy was a hard one, given that her new husband insisted she have some sort of way to provide an income for herself and the baby, because ‘like hell he was going to pay for her mistake,’ even though he had had no condom and she was unprepared, given she was a virgin. For nearly eight months, she worked as much as she could bear in a sandwich shop in town, bearing her ever-increasing weight on tired, swollen feet, only to come home to cook dinner for herself and her absent husband. He never beat her when she was carrying, though he often looked as though he’d like to. Everything involving the baby was her responsibility as far as he was concerned, including the name, which is why the little boy she holds in her arms is named Henry Jason Bowers, with none of Butch’s intervention. She cradles him close to her breast as he begins to settle, long blond lashes fluttering as he looks up at her, all childish wonder and fascination. 

 

* * *

 

 

Henry Bowers is five, living in a house that smells of cheap booze and cigarettes, a stained carpet littered with children’s toys and bottles. Dressed in secondhand clothes and put up in a room that’s only slightly larger than a storage closet, he’s as happy as can be. His mother, only twenty-three and with permanent dark circles under her eyes, plays with him, her hair a bird’s nest of dirty blond curls, her nails bitten and stained yellow with nicotine. She smokes, never around Henry, but it’s the only way she can cope with the monster living in their home who is Butch Bowers. He’s hit her, plenty of times, and yelled at Henry even more. The boy, of course, doesn’t understand why, other than he’s  _ a little bastard who ain’t good for shit _ . He runs, crying, nearly every night, to his room, while his mother argues with her husband, whose last name she hated to take. 

 

She remembers a time when she had a future beyond Derry, Maine, when her dreams were big and her hope even bigger, when the last place she imagined herself being was stuck in a loveless marriage to an abuser. Henry giggles, reaching for her with chubby fingers, his other hand gripping a stuffed bear, and she forces a smile as she reaches for her son. He takes a few clumsy steps towards her before falling onto his backside, which only produces more giggles. He’s going to be starting first grade in a few weeks, once the summer is over, and she wonders how she’s going to pay for supplies when she’s also expected to pay for everything in the house that isn’t booze or cigarettes. Her son pulls at the sleeve of her faded floral dress, and she swoops him into her arms as she strokes the soft blond hair that matches her own as she carries him to the kitchen for lunch. 

 

* * *

 

 

Henry is eight, hidden under the kitchen table as his parents fight again. His father’s yells seem to shake the house as his mother screams back, something about  _ school  _ and  _ money  _ and  _ Henry.  _ It’s a grown-up conversation, one he knows he’s not ready for, but everything in his house is too grown-up for him anyway. He’s not allowed to play with the glass bottles, isn’t allowed to have cigarettes, has to stay in his room until dinner after school and go right back afterwards. He shrinks even smaller as his father grabs his mother by the hair, yelling louder about his  _ drink.  _ Henry’s lower lip trembles as he starts to worry that bringing up the way the other kids at school make fun of him for his nose, his  _ pig nose _ , has brought this argument on. 

 

His father drags his mother, screaming, into the living room, his police baton in one hand as he yells at her for  _ her son.  _ Henry hides his face behind his hands, wishing he had some way to cover his ears, too, as his mother begs his father not to. It’s too long, much too long, before the yelling stops, and when he dares look again, his mother lays motionless on the floor. His father’s eyes tell him to go straight to his room, or worse things will happen. He runs as fast as his legs will take him, to his closet of his room, trembling as he hears his father outside, the unmistakable sound of bottles being kicked around as he settles back into his chair. The ambulance shows up, two hours later, two hours much too late. 

 

* * *

 

Henry is ten when his father tells him he’s not taking him to get a goddamned haircut. In the privacy of his room, he takes the kitchen shears and and cuts, rather unevenly, around his head, until he’s left with choppy layers and a duck tail. The next day at school, the little blond boy named Victor Criss pushes him off his chair during lunch and makes off with Henry’s sandwich. Henry gets back at him the next day by pulling his hair, and they both end up after school scrubbing chalkboards as punishment. He learns that Victor isn’t so bad, and after school detention sucks. It’s the first time Henry has had a sort-of friend in school, and his first instinct is to never tell his father. 

 

That night, when he comes home, his father beats him black and blue for not washing the dishes that  _ he  _ put in the sink over the course of the day. Sore and shaking, Henry washes every dish in the kitchen till they’re sparkling, and his cold dinner waits for him, the sky outside already dark. He’s forbidden from using the microwave, and he chokes down his cold spaghetti before retreating to his bedroom, where he stays up till eleven doing his homework alone. He understands very little of it, so little that he leaves half his worksheet blank as he curls up in his tiny twin bed, his body aching. 

 

* * *

 

Henry is twelve, just shy of the beginning of his teenage years, and the new kid in class is bigger than he is, stronger than he is, and he burps right in Henry’s face during recess. It provokes a fight between the two of them, and he walks away with a black eye while the other boy gets a split lip from Henry’s ring. As though by fate, they both end up washing graffiti off the side of the school together, and Reggie Huggins turns out to be okay. However, Henry vows to call him Belch from now on, no matter how much his new friend yells at him for it. Luckily for him, Belch likes Victor, and vice versa. The three of them are inseparable for the summer following, and Henry feels the most comfortable outside of his home he’s ever felt. 

 

When he comes home that night, however, and his father belts the back of his legs until Henry is forced to crawl to his room, as punishment for getting into a fight  _ again.  _ Around midnight, he sneaks out of his room when his father is blacked out, and stuffs his mouth full of food, his arms full of chips as he hurries back to his room, hides the food under his dirty laundry. He spends the next day hunched over the toilet, vomiting up the contents of his stomach, the expired food tasting ten times worse coming back up. His father beats him again for stealing food, and the next time Henry sneaks food, he stuffs it into a backpack in a convenience store while Vic and Belch keep a lookout. 

 

* * *

 

 

Henry is fifteen, and when Patrick Hockstetter corners him in the hallway of Derry High, he gives the lanky boy a shove, eliciting a giggle from Patrick as he threatens to send him back to wherever he came from if Patrick shoulder checks him again. He’s become Derry’s most notorious bully over the last three years, both his friends having rubbed off on him. Now, as they all back Patrick into a corner, Henry pulls a bone-handled knife from his jeans pocket and threatens to cut his name into Patrick as the latter just giggles. The knife alone earns Henry a month’s worth of after school detention, with Vic, Belch, and Patrick. It takes him longer to like Patrick than it took with the other two, but by the time September is over, the three have become four. 

 

His father has stopped giving as much of a shit, but it’s mainly because Henry spends as little time at home as possible. He sneaks out an hour early in the morning, sneaks back in at midnight each night. He’s spent that hour before school sleeping on Belch’s couch, in Vic’s guest room, Patrick’s garage, and every night, the four of them raise hell in all of Derry together. Henry’s lost the duck tail, but he’s still had to make do doing his hair on his own, cutting it into an uneven, choppy mullet for school as of lately. A pack of cigarettes is tucked into his pocket, his knife hidden under his shirt, the inside of his mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood as he chews the inside of his cheek. When he smiles, blood stains his teeth a ghastly red. 

 

* * *

 

Henry Jason Bowers is fifteen years old, and with one hand, he holds his father’s struggling form down in that goddamned chair he’s sat in for the last fifteen years every night. With the other hand, he pulls the long blade of his knife out of his father’s neck, blood splattering his face. His father is strong, but Henry is stronger, by some willing force that isn’t god that controls him, that erases every other feeling in his body other than a cold, calm, serene anger, that makes him feel bigger than this entire shitty town, bigger than this entire world. He thinks briefly of his mother, the only person who looked at him with love in her eyes, not fear or anger. As his father goes still, Henry lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, his chest heaving as his arm drops limply by his side.

  
_ He’s gone, _ Henry thinks.  _ I win, I won.  _ But his chest is heavy, his heart aching, not a bit for his father, but for his mother. He remembers her last night on the earth, the way his father beat her to death, the way the ambulance showed up too late, two hours too late. He remembers the fear he’d felt then, for so many years after then, put there by his father. It’s gone now, replaced with an inexplicable calm. Henry retracts the blade on his knife as he slips it back into his pocket, and he leaves his father, still bleeding, in the chair. As though in a trance, Henry leaves his house, the prison, the hell he lived in for fifteen miserable years. He wins, he won. But what victory is such a hollow one that the feeling of satisfaction is gone when he reaches the end of the driveway?

**Author's Note:**

> hello! if you've read this far then _thank you_ , I hope you enjoyed my word vomit about one of my favorite murder boys. my tumblr is [here](http://supremeleaderdaddy.tumblr.com/), but I also have a second IT blog [here](http://hoestetter.tumblr.com/). come yell with me about the gang I love them so much


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